Confield

Warp; 2001

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Autechre albums, like Stanley Kubrick films, are the substance of critics' nightmares. For all of his artistry, Kubrick occasionally dropped bombs like Barry Lyndon, a film that bored audiences at its debut and never gained relevance with time. All directors can claim their share of failures, but Kubrick's affinity for intellectual understatement often masked the initial appeal of his work, making it difficult for audiences to separate the wheat from the chaff when his movies first came out.

Only the passage of time distinguished the strokes of cinematic brilliance from their clumsy, hollow counterparts; but reviewers, bound to deadlines, never got to enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Instead, they resorted to blind guesses, issued sharply divided reviews, and crossed their fingers in hopes that, when the smoke eventually cleared, the future would prove them right.

So imagine my anxiety when I discovered I had only a week to come to terms with Autechre's new long-player, Confield. The group's oeuvre includes equal measures of visionary genius and uninspired tripe. While LP5 and Tri Repetae++ remind us that Rob Brown and Sean Booth have access to a talent matched by only a handful of contemporary electronic producers, Amber and Chiastic Slide suggest that this access is inconsistent, fleeting and out of their control.

To further complicate things, Confield catches the pair in the most abstract, difficult period of their nine-year recording career. I've had the album for just over a week now, and must confess I'm still not certain I have a firm grasp on it. But I've given the songs enough effort and attention (headphones and speakers, stoned and sober, and several times without pause from beginning to end) to draw a few early conclusions. And it pleases me to announce that they're resoundingly favorable.

Confield picks up where its predecessor, the four-track Peel Session 2 EP, left off-- splicing the ambient, non-musical styles of artists like Kit Clayton and Phthalocyanine into Autechre's more structured syntheses. Booth and Brown exercise a meticulous economy of melody on this disc, so much so that many of the tracks cease to resemble proper songs.

They have instead assembled an album of ordered soundscapes-- nine methodically arranged pieces that rely largely on repetition of textural, dissonant and atonal sounds to construct a variety of aural climates. Think EP7 without the hooks. Think early Tetsu Inoue, with twice the depth and a penchant for foundry sounds. Now welcome to Confield, where the local time is the tomorrow.

My first listen to this album required a great deal of toil and patience-- desperately listening for rhythms, trends, bits of melodic resolution and a general sense of cohesion. I made the mistake of launching straight into "Bine," the sixth track, which discouraged me because it had none of those things. In retrospect, I should have started where Autechre wanted me to: with "VI Scose Poise," the album's opener.

Though one of Confield's least satisfying pieces, the first track offers a roadmap for the material that follows. Booth and Brown employ techniques in this song that recur more subtly in later tracks, and the opener becomes a means by which to understand some of the disc's more challenging material. The song is, in a sense, a metaphor for the record at large: patterns emerge from the discord; cacophonous droning wells up in tense knots, then dissipates with the appearance of three-note melodic bursts; the sonic hellstorm relents in scattered moments of clarity, but never recesses for long. Just as the melodies begin to acquire complexity, the song comes to an abrupt close, dropping the listener once again onto foreign soil.

"Cfern," which follows, comes out swinging with a disjointed barrage of elastic snares. Languid synth pads churn out a stagnant stew of dissonant notes, in which the clicks become burps and the cuts become bubbles. "Pen Expers," next on the playlist, ups the tempo with a spastic drill-n-bass joint whose vacuum-navigated drums and reversed string hits evoke imagery of liposuction.

Confield carries on like this until the final note-- each song establishes a personality distinct from the rest, cautiously balancing musicality with chaos. The latter half of the disc actually surpasses the former. The subtle funk of "Parhelic Triangle," the record's apogee, reminisces of "Acroyear2" from LP5. A brooding, troglodytic bassline chugs through a spectral landscape of chimes, bells and railroad crossings, while the violent sounds of a threshing machine keep the pace. "Lentic Catachresis" closes the show with a blistering exercise in drum programming. Booth and Brown wind the beats progressively tighter, capping the album with a thick lid of percussive sound.

Many long-time Autechre enthusiasts will feel alienated by the pair's latest release. It's not Tri Repetae++, but it's unlikely that Booth and Brown will ever revisit the trademark sound that brought them fame. For those willing to take these times in stride, Confield promises elegant production, accessibility in moderation, and one of the most enveloping, thought-provoking listening experiences to come forth from leftfield this year. You just have to reach for it.